In the 18th century Britain frequently issued lottery loans, selling bonds whose sizewas determined by a draw soon after the sale. The probability distribution was perfectly known ex-ante and highly skewed. After the draw the bonds were identical (except for size) and indistinguishable from...

In the 18th century Britain frequently issued lottery loans, selling bonds whose size was determined by a draw soon after the sale. The probability distribution was perfectly known ex-ante and highly skewed. After the draw the bonds were identical (except for size) and indistinguishable from...

Major bubble episodes are rare events. In this paper, we examine what factors might cause some asset price bubbles to become very large. We recreate, in a laboratory setting, some of the specific institutional features investors in the South Sea Company faced in 1720. Several factors have been...

Empirical studies on quoted options highlight deviations from the theoretical model of Black and Scholes; this is due to different causes, such as assumptions regarding the price dynamics, markets frictions and investors' attitude toward risk. In this contribution, we focus on this latter issue...

We derive the optimal portfolio choice for an investor who behaves according to Cumulative Prospect Theory. The study is done in a one-period economy with one risk-free asset and one risky asset, and the reference point corresponds to the terminal wealth arising when the entire initial wealth is...

We investigate whether alternative asset classes should be included in optimal portfolios of the most prominent investor personae in the Behavioral Finance literature, namely, the Cumulative Prospect Theory, the Markowitz and the Loss Averse types of investors. We develop a stochastic spanning...

We evaluate European financial options under continuous cumulative prospect theory. Within this framework, it is possible to model investors’ attitude toward risk, which may be one of the possible causes of mispricing. We focus on probability risk attitudes and consider alternative probability...

This paper investigates whether the overpricing of out-of-the money single stock calls can be explained by Tversky and Kahneman's (1992) cumulative prospect theory (CPT). We hypothesize that these options are expensive because investors overweight small probability events and overpay for...

The combination of credit constraints and indivisible consumption goods may induce some risk-averse individuals to gamble to have a chance of crossing a purchasing threshold. One implication of this is that income effects for individuals who choose to gamble are likely to be larger than for the...